The Hobo Dock, originally uploaded by SA-7™.

So, a couple of weeks ‘mi familia’ was nice enough to get me an iPod Touch 2G for the birthday. Woot!

Since I’m too cheap to spring for a dock I used my old Western Digital MyBook external hard disk and incorporated the dock insert that came with the Touch into it’s side. It took a heated cutter, some kind of liquid cement and a whole lot of patience. The edges are fugly right now because of the extra cement on them but I’ll clean that up. What would make this mod really cool would be to incoroprate a tiny USB hub into the MyBook so I’d have only one USB cable to the MacBook Pro. Click the image for notes on what’s in the picture. The Macbook Pro is at a wierd angle because it’s sitting on a laptop stand I made out of recycled cardboard after reading an article at Unplggd.com. If you use a laptop on a regular basis do your back and neck a favour and make one for yourself. Out of the frame on the left is a keyboard, mouse and a 22″ LG LCD monitor with extremely crap viewing angles.

Sorry for the shiite quality of the picture. Serves me right for using a camera phone.

First, the concert. One of the bands performing was a Bhutanese band called ‘Who’s your Daddy?‘ and they did AC/DC covers. (I am not making any of this up)

All in all, a pleasant evening and even though I didn’t hear a single really great band, I didn’t hear anyone that sucked either. Perhaps because we left before Parikrama came on. (Don’t send me hate mail, I get off on it)

I finally saw a lot of groups that people have been telling me about for a while like Shair & Func and Skinny Alley and all I can say is that none of them really rocked my boat.

What did rock my boat was the Old Fort or Purana Qila. Forts still fascinate me in a way only people who spent their entire childhood daydreaming, will understand. The entire city of Delhi is dotted with these little tombs or isolated, dilapidated ramparts (in my expert opinion) from bygone eras, built by bygone rulers. You often come upon these little fragments in the most bizarre places, in back of beyond bylanes, in the middle of abandoned playgrounds, on the fairways of golf-courses.

When you are new to the city this is brilliant, like a little treasure hunt. But as with most great things, you soon get jaded and about these forts and tombs.

But every once in a while you see them at night, lit up and it reminds you of how fucking spectacular these forts are and how craptacular your own life’s work is when compared to them. It’s like the Mughals are mocking us.

Oh wow! You made a short-film? A TV Show? Well I built this fort that’s been around for three hundred years and it will probably be around for another three hundred years after you’ve been dead and forgotten kiddo. So tell me, who’s your daddy?

Crap. I gotta build a fort.

In other news I got an iPod Touch! Woot! As birthday gifts go, the only one that has ever been better was waking up on my sixth birthday to find a Sony Z-10 Walkman playing on my parents’ bed. I didn’t even ask for it or anything. Just how gifts ought to be.

Last year, I got a 1st generation iPod Touch as a review unit for a tech show I was producing and I shot a 20 minute story about how to Jailbreak an iPod Touch. It was an intricate, multi-step process that involved a lot of command line poking around and was not for the faint of heart.

A week before the story was supposed to air, software was released into the wild that let you complete the entire process in about twenty seconds with a single mouse click.

Crap. Welcome to television.

So when I got this iPod Touch I thought I’d jailbreak it and make it do my bidding in no time.

Nope. In the ever escalating war of cat and mouse between Apple and the would be iPhone/iPod Touch unlockers it would seem that Apple currently has the upper hand. 

I’ve almost managed to brick this thing twice in the 24 hours I’ve had it and for now I’m giving up and waiting till someone comes up with an easier way to do it. If a second expensive MP3 player dies on me I’ll have to fucking shoot myself. So, for now the iPod Touch shall remain untouched.

But soon enough some nerdy teenager, frustrated at the persistence of his virginity and hopped up on Red Bull, shall come up with a crack for the latest firmware version, 2.2.1 for the iPod Touch 2G and then I will hack this thing and make it my bitch and I shall hold it in my hand and say to it…

‘Who’s your daddy?’